In recent years, Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technologies have emerged as a fast-growing market. Among the various WLAN technologies, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standard is the dominating technology and is frequently used for WLANs.
A challenge to provide WLAN access that meets a desired performance criteria and/or a cost criteria is the identification of a suitable set of network components (for example, access points) for installation within any deployment environment.
A set of network components suitable for one deployment environment may not necessarily be suitable for another deployment environment due to differences in the characteristics of the deployment environments.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.